In Imitation of Apples
by Gogol
Summary: Chekov crosses paths with a certain pair of immortals relatively early in life.


For his eleventh birthday, his mother takes him to London.

They almost miss the shuttle, because Pavel dislikes mornings and surprises and London is both, but his mother snaps her badge in the faces of the security officers like a duelist with a glove, and they make it in minutes before the doors slide shut.

"Why London?" he says, when he has his breath back.

"You will see," she tells him. She does not give satisfying answers: she says she prefers to ask satisfying questions, but it is Pavel's belief that she simply finds other people's pain and bewilderment funny.

He rests his curly head on her shoulder. He sulks.

London is sleek and bright and much like home, except for the occasional façade of old stone that looms up suddenly when they turn a corner. Pavel supposes that there must be a historical district, for the tourists, but his mother does not seem to have brought him here for the architecture. She drags him away from every interesting sight, and she seems to be following a path her feet learned long ago, when maybe the map looked a little different: they pass through shopping complexes and out the other side without stopping, and Pavel counts six separate incidences of jaywalking, which is impressive even by his mother's high standards.

"Here," she says at last, coming up short in front of a little brick building with a dark window that seems to be made of real glass, _old_ glass, to judge from how it thickens at the base.

"Where is here?" Pavel asks. The shops on either side are tastelessly colored and metallic and some of what he glimpsed in their holographic window displays verged on the pornographic, which was nice, but he is not sure this is a shop at all. If it is a shop it is a very strange one.

His mother makes no reply, except to ring the bell.

"Coming," says someone inside.

The door opens. The man on the other side seems to Pavel to be terribly old, but his mother embraces him and says, in Standard, "You haven't aged at all, Mr. Fell."

Mr. Fell bears up well under the assault, although Pavel sees his eyebrows rise, over the top of his mother's hair.

"Miss Chekov," he says, after a moment's hesitation. "Hullo, there. Steady on," he adds, laughing a little as he disentangles himself. "It _has_been a while, hasn't it? Goodness."

Forever, Pavel thinks, if you're calling her miss.

His mother, though, doesn't seem to mind. "Decades," she says happily. "Now let me in."

Mr. Fell coughs and examines his fingernails. "We're closed, you know. It says so on the door."

His mother bursts into laughter.

She's still laughing when Pavel comes to a decision and says, "It is my birthday," giving Mr. Fell his best hopeful look. He is curious, now. He didn't know his mother had any friends who were not also Russian scientists. He didn't know his mother had any friends who wore tartan scarves indoors. Or outdoors. Or in any ambiguous quantum states of doored-ness. And curiosity has always outweighed minor matters like suspicion and fear, in Pavel's mind.

"Is that right?" says Mr. Fell, regarding him calmly. "And how old do you turn today?"

"Eleven."

Something glimmers in Mr. Fell's eye.

"Well," he says, "I suppose I can make an exception for an eleventh birthday."

"Of course you can," says Pavel's mother, recovering her composure at last. "Lead on, Macduff."

"Lay on," corrects Mr. Fell, mildly; but he steps out of her way.

They go in.

Pavel's first impression is of a degree of darkness not easily explained by tinted glass windows or the foggy street. His second impression is of _smell_: utterly unfamiliar, strong and strange and dry, a smell that pervades the still air and stings his nostrils.

He claps a hand over his nose. His mother gives him a dirty look, made doubly terrifying by the shadows that dominate her face.

"I'm sorry," she says to Mr. Fell. "My son has only recently come back into my care. He was raised, you know, by wolves."

"_Please_, Mother," Pavel says in Russian, but he removes his hand.

"Hm?" says Mr. Fell, glancing at him. "Oh. Are you quite all right? The dust sometimes takes people that way, I'm afraid."

He switches on a lamp. The bulb flickers and glows yellow through the shade; it's an antique.

Pavel looks away, and discovers that neither the stench nor the dispelled dark is the most important thing about this room. The most important thing about this room is that it is full of books.

Books line the walls and scrape the ceiling and lie stacked on the tables. There are more books piled on one old wingchair than he's ever seen gathered in one place. And such _books_: hardbound, mostly bound with what looks like real leather, some of them, and wood-based paper pages, the texture unmistakable.

"Mother of God," he says.

"_Pavel_," his mother hisses. Under other circumstances Pavel would find this strange, since as a rule she tolerates cursing and encourages blasphemy; but just now he barely hears her.

"That's quite all right," says Mr. Fell. Pavel doesn't hear him, either.

He walks forward. The books' bindings glitter at him, welcomingly: gilt and ink and cloth worn shiny by years, their old spines laced with light.

"Do be careful," Mr. Fell says, quietly.

Pavel slides one off the shelf at random. He is careful.

His mother and Mr. Fell watch him read, for a while.

"You're going to buy him something, aren't you," says Mr. Fell, without much rancor.

"I was thinking about it," his mother admits. "I want to be sure he remembers your establishment, after all."

She smiles at him, wolfishly. It is probably for the best that Pavel is engrossed in his book.

"Yes, well. I don't think there's much danger of him forgetting, really. Takes after you."

"Most people say he looks like his father."

"Rubbish," says Mr. Fell. "Got your eyes, doesn't he?"

"Hm," says Pavel's mother, noncommittally. In the lamplight her eyes are very much her own, and they shine like the sky over a town that's rather nearer to London now than it was two hundred-odd years ago. "Do you know, they didn't serve drinks on the flight here? I'm parched."

"I believe I still have some vodka from the last time you visited," Mr. Fell says cheerfully.

Pavel's mother punches him lightly on the shoulder, and when he offers her his arm she takes it.

"The Chateau 1789 will do nicely, thank you. And just for that nationalist comment, I'll buy a first edition," she says.

"_Really_, my dear," Mr. Fell sighs; "blackmail is beneath you."

They retreat together to the back room of the shop, talking quietly. Pavel doesn't notice them go.

He does look up, though, some hours and a novel later, when someone else enters the shop. The someone is wearing sunglasses, in defiance of both fog and fashion, and he has a distinctly agitated air.

"Hallo," he says, drawing up short at the sight of Pavel. "Who're you?"

"I am Pavel Andreievich Chekov," Pavel says.

"The shop's closed," says the man. Then he pauses. "Chekov, did you say?"

"Yes."

The man leans in to look at his face, and Pavel glimpses yellow, over the tops of the dark lenses.

"Well, well," he says, straightening again. "I suppose the shop isn't closed, to you."

Pavel says nothing.

"What are you reading?"

"The Count of Monte Cristo."

"That's a bit old for you, isn't it?" says the man, tilting his head.

"Is not," says Pavel, coolly. "Is easy."

"Sure," says the man. "And you like it, do you? Not bored? Don't see many kids in this shop, even when it's open."

"I'm not a child," says Pavel. His mother would disapprove of the petulance in his voice: _prove it_, she would say, _empirically, or keep your peace_. But his mother is preoccupied with other things at this moment.

"Really," says the man.

"I'm a scientist," says Pavel.

The man grins. His grin is small and sharp and there is something wrong with how it fits into his jaw, though not unpleasantly so. "You like to find things out?"

"I like to _know_ things."

The grin widens.

"I wish you luck," he says, and without another word walks past Pavel to the door of the back room. He opens it, and for a moment Pavel catches a snatch of song, being mangled in his mother's mouth; and then the door closes behind him.

Pavel glares at it. "I do not need luck," he says, but the woodwork does not reply.

A part of him would like to go up to the door and press his ear to the crack. But he has only begun to explore, and books, he reasons, are more important than people. They are rarer and more perfect and they last. Their very impractical physicality gives them power beyond the power of the stories piled in his padd; they are thought given weight. And weight fascinates him; has always fascinated him. The pull that brings apples down from branches and ships down from stars is the pull that guides his mind forward. Compared to that, friends of his mother and condescension from strangers are nothing. Dust to be shaken off the cover.

He reads on. There are hundreds of years stored here, he thinks, more truly and heavily than in any of his history textbooks. It is almost as good as if there were people who had lived through that distant past, talking among themselves in that room: or the next room over.


End file.
